Anti-Abortion Insanity

[_canpakes]

And to make things worse, with Trump busily doing his darnedest to stack all the Federal courts, including the supreme court, ....

he is not trying, he is winning...check that NY court.
#whileyouweredistractedbyMeanTweets

Gunner both mentioned this and used the word, “doing”.

I’m still thinking that English is not your first language.

[_Gunnar]

As if anti-pro choice extremists were not already bad enough or misogynistic enough, take a look at this: Arrested for Having a Miscarriage? 7 Appalling Instances Where Pregnant Women Were Criminalized.

Anti-abortion laws hurt all women, including those who are against abortion.

It does not really matter whether a woman is pro- or anti-abortion. In states like Tennessee, with its freshly passed anti-abortion amendment, you can be arrested for having a miscarriage.

An alarming number of women are being arrested, prosecuted and jailed just for losing their pregnancies. In addition to anti-abortion measures, you can thank the advance of “personhood” fights for embryos, fetuses and even fertilized eggs for that.

In a recent op-ed for the New York Times, Lynn M. Paltrow and Jeanne Flavin of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women offer up some of the most egregious cases of the criminalization of pregnant women. "Since 2005, we have identified an additional 380 cases, with more arrests occurring every week,” they write. “This significant increase coincides with what the Guttmacher Institute describes as a 'seismic shift' in the number of states with laws hostile to abortion rights.”

Here are their six most horrifying examples, with lots more to come.

1. A critically ill, 27-year-old Washington D.C. woman was 26 weeks pregnant when a judge ordered her to have a Cesarean section. He did so with the understanding that the procedure would very likely kill her. It did. The baby died as well.

2. A pregnant woman in Iowa fell down a flight of stairs and went to the hospital. The hospital reported her to the police who arrested her for “attempted fetal homicide.”

3. A Utah woman gave birth to twins, one of which was stillborn. Her doctors blamed the death on her decision to delay a C-section. She was arrested for fetal homicide.

4. A Louisiana woman checked in to a hospital due to vaginal bleeding. She was locked up for a year on charges of “second-degree murder before medical records revealed she had suffered a miscarriage at 11 to 15 weeks of pregnancy.”

5. A Florida woman “was held prisoner at a hospital to prevent her from going home while she appeared to be experiencing a miscarriage. She was forced to undergo a Cesarean.” She still lost the baby, and her two small children at home were left without her while she was held. A state court ruled that this detention was wrong, although it would have been fine if she was further along in her pregnancy.

6. Another Florida woman who went into labor at home was picked up by a sheriff, driven to the hospital and forced to have a Cesarean against her will. She filed suit, and the court concluded that the woman’s personal constitutional rights “clearly did not outweigh the interests of the State of Florida in preserving the life of the unborn child.”

7. A severely depressed, pregnant 22-year-old woman in South Carolina tried to commit suicide. She was jailed for child abuse.

This does not count all the women who have been arrested for drinking alcohol or using illegal drugs.

Anyone who is not horrified and outraged by this is a horribly misogynistic and scientifically ignorant monster, not to mention virtually devoid of human compassion for others (or at least, for women)!

For yet more examples of this kind of insane atrocity, see here:

[Guest]

Abuse of fetal homicide laws.

At least 38 of the 50 US states have introduced “fetal homicide laws.” Backers of these laws have claimed that they are intended to protect women and their unborn children from attack by an abusive partner or other third parties, but state prosecutors have seized upon the legislation to attack the rights of pregnant mothers.

The intent of such laws is fine, if they were used only ". . .to protect women and their unborn children from attack by an abusive partner or other third parties. . ." as claimed, but that is rarely how such laws are actually used.

According to the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, prosecutors in South Carolina, one of the first states to introduce a fetal homicide law, have only charged one man under the legislation. and his case was subsequently dismissed. By contrast, as many as 300 South Carolina women have been arrested for their alleged actions against their unborn children during pregnancy.

Woman across the country are being increasingly prosecuted for their alleged drug and alcohol abuse during pregnancy, with charges ranging from misdemeanor counts of endangering the welfare of a child to criminal homicide. According to the Dominion Post, at least two women so charged have been sentenced to life in prison.

Illinois was the first state to charge a woman with manslaughter in connection with a stillborn baby. Prosecutors claimed the baby died as a result of high levels of cocaine, but a grand jury refused to indict. Texas, New York, Arizona, Hawaii, Utah and California are among the states with similar laws on the books.

In Riverside County, California, police authorities have declared prosecutions of mothers addicted to methamphetamine as a “top priority.” Dozens of public health organizations, including the American Public Health Association and the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry, have denounced the prosecutions because they discourage woman not only from seeking substance abuse treatment, but from getting any prenatal care at all.

In Utah, following several high-profile prosecutions in the 1990s of women for substance abuse during pregnancy, state officials saw a sharp drop-off in requests for treatment from drug addicted women. After widespread coverage of the prosecutions, calls to the state health department’s Pregnancy Risk Line fell to almost zero per month.

“Women were showing up at hospitals in droves to deliver babies having had no prenatal care and no substance abuse treatment,” Lynn Martinez, director of the hotline and of the state’s birth defects and genetics program, told the media.

She added, “When asked why they hadn’t sought help, their answers were almost universal: They were worried they would either lose their children or be prosecuted. So suddenly you had a double whammy: babies exposed to drugs and babies not getting prenatal care.”

Does anyone here fail to see how inhumane, unfair and misogynistic such misapplication of fetal homicide laws is?

[_Gunnar]

Actually it’s described as “Pro Life”. But why quibble with ignorant bias.

Funny though, seems lately that the most “out of control women activists” seem to have the least likely odds of ever needing an abortion. For example, rape or otherwise, can anyone ever imagine this lovely lady ever becoming impregnated:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/freebeacon ... t-unc/amp/

Thoughts?

Characterizing anti-prochoice advocates as pro-life is inherently hypocritical and dishonest, in most cases, because so many of the "pro-lifers" are just as adamantly opposed supporting any kind of government assistance to help sustain the life of the babies impoverished single mothers are forced to carry to full term, once they are born, as they are to abortion. What is even more foolish is that many of the same people so adamantly and even violently opposed to abortion are also opposed to any form of contraception that effectively reduces the number of unwanted or accidental pregnancies, and thus the demand for abortions.

Besides that, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that making abortions illegal has very little or no effect on the number of abortions. It only makes them more dangerous and more consequential to both the women involved and society in general. Such extreme opposition to abortion makes sense only if one's overriding objective is to exact vengeance and punishment on any and all who do not share one's own religiously based views on this subject.

[_Chap]

... one's overriding objective is to exact vengeance and punishment on any and all who do not share one's own religiously based views on this subject.

Umm, there was this Guy in the Sky called Yahweh who used to see things like that. But I think he changed his name when he arrived at Ellis Island.

[_Some Schmo]

Actually it’s described as “Pro Life”.

Well, that's the spin, but we all know you aren't pro-life. It's far more accurate to say anti-abortion, because we know you don't give a damn about that life once it's born.

[_EAllusion]

Conversely, on no other subject than abortion is the side that favors the freedom to commit an act that others want criminalized the “pro-choice” side. Normally that would be seen as an absurd tilting of the rhetorical ground. But, of course, wanting virtually anything to be legal can just as easily be called pro-choice. Favor genocide? Why, that’s pro-choice.

Of course, the response to this is likely to be that abortion involves what women do with their bodies, but that’s equally true of all acts. Every criminal sanction restricts what you may do with your body. If one retorts that in the case of abortion, it *only* involves one person’s body, then that very point is what is in dispute.

[_Maksutov]

Remember that behind much of this is an even more sinister fear of changing racial demographics. The most insecure members of certain groups will act out first, cultural outliers that are also trigger points for action, including potential for violence.

[Guest]

Of course, the response to this is likely to be that abortion involves what women do with their bodies, but that’s equally true of all acts. Every criminal sanction restricts what you may do with your body.

Before we start talking about abortion. let's not forget something: conceiving and bearing a child to term (and in all likelihood taking on the long-term burden of child-raising thereafter), is a very, very different kind of thing from the large number of acts done 'with the body' that are subject to criminal sanctions, such as taking forcibly taking hold of someone's wallet, punching someone in the face, kicking them, pulling the trigger of a loaded gun pointing at them, and so on.

One crucial distinction is that the criminalised physical acts listed above are intentionally done external acts affecting others. Pregnancy, from which all the rest follows, is more like something that happens to a woman, and in many cases she had no wish at all for that to happen. There is no parallel circumstance preceding the other 'things done with the body' to which you refer. Subsequent possibilities need to be considered in that light.

[edited for typo]

[_canpakes]

One crucial distinction is that the criminalised physical acts listed above are intentionally done external acts affecting others. Pregnancy, from which all the rest follows, is more like something that happens to a woman, and in many cases she had no wish at all for that to happen.

Or, to put it more plainly in the case of rape or incest, it is indeed an example of an “intentionally done external act affecting another” individual.